Moody Minds Distempered

Essays on Melancholy and Depression

Jennifer Radden

Variously and thoroughly interdisciplinary--bringing in medical psychiatry, philosophy, psychology, history of medicine, history of ideas, feminist theory, literature and cultural studies

Newly written introduction develops on previous research by the author

Moody Minds Distempered

Essays on Melancholy and Depression

Jennifer Radden

Description

In Moody Minds Distempered philosopher Jennifer Radden assembles several decades of her research on melancholy and depression. The chapters are ordered into three categories: those about intellectual and medical history of melancholy and depression; those that emphasize aspects of the moral, psychological and medical features of these concepts; and finally, those that explore the sad and apprehensive mood states long associated with melancholy and depressive subjectivity. A newly written introduction maps the conceptual landscape, and draws out the analytic and thematic interconnections between the chapters.

Radden emphasizes and develops several new themes: the implications, theoretical phenomenological and moral, of recognizing melancholy and depressive states as mood states; questions of method, as they affect how we understand and characterize claims about melancholy and depression; and the persistence and force of cultural tropes linking such states to brilliance, creativity, and sagacity. Insights from literature and the history of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry are woven together with those from the more recent disciplines of feminist theory and cultural studies. This is interdisciplinary writing at its best-part analytic philosophy, and part history of ideas.

Moody Minds Distempered

Essays on Melancholy and Depression

Jennifer Radden

Table of Contents

IntroductionSection 1: HISTORY: Intellectual and medical history of melancholy and depression 1. Melancholia in the Writing of a Sixteenth Century Spanish Nun2. Melancholy, History of a Concept3. Melancholy and MelancholiaSection 2: CATEGORIES: Melancholy and Depression as Medical, Psychological, and Moral Concepts 4. Is this Dame Melancholy? Equating Depression and Melancholia5. The Psychiatry of Cross Cultural Suffering6. Epidemic Depression and Burtonian Melancholy7. Emotional Pain and Psychiatry8. Lumps and Bumps: Kantian Faculty Psychology, Phrenology and Twentieth Century Psychiatric Classification9. Love and Loss in Freud's "Mourning and Melancholia": a RereadingSection 3: SUBJECTIVITY: Melancholyas Subjective, Sad and Apprehensive Moods 10. My Symptoms, Myself: Reading Mental Illness Memoirs for Identity Assumptions11. Melancholy, Mood and Landscape12. Review of Against Depression by Peter Kramer

Moody Minds Distempered

Essays on Melancholy and Depression

Jennifer Radden

Author Information

Jennifer Radden's research is focused on philosophical issues arising out of mental health concepts and policy, and psychiatric practice. She is past president of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry, and her published work includes The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva. She edited The Philosophy of Psychiatry: A Companion (OUP 2004).

Moody Minds Distempered

Essays on Melancholy and Depression

Jennifer Radden

Reviews and Awards

"Jennifer Radden has, over many years of original research, produced a series of papers that shows us what the rigorous study of melancholy should look like. By bringing together most of those papers in one volume, O.U.P. has done a great service to the multi-disciplinary readership to which Radden's work is addressed."--Anthony Hatzimoysis, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews